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Anime and Manga

In the second Sakura Wars OAV, Kohran is mistaken by a group of kids for Shounen Red, a character she plays on a radio drama — and then attacked by the baddies-of-the-episode. The rest of the team has to come up with a way to rescue her without breaking the illusion and "shattering the children's dreams."

In Super Gals the main children characters (Sayo & co) mistake the actor from the series of Odaiba Shark as the real character, even when they see it filmed. Every time they meet he pretends to be the character to protect their dreams. Said actor was written out of the show for one episode and appeared in a kid's show as an exercise coach. Sayo believes it's by chance they look similar.

One Astro City story featured an actor who played the superhero "Crimson Cougar" on a soap opera. After he foils a convenience-store robbery while in costume, people start treating him like a real superhero... including supervillains out to kill him.

Leads to trouble in one Lucky Luke album which involves a troupe of actors. Lucky is accused of a crime, and when the actor of a Dastardly Whiplash-like villain defends Luke, the settlers only get angrier.

The first was an old woman who, confusing her for her vixen character on the show, slapped her and called her a tramp. While the old woman was no threat to Mary Jane, the fan was, minutes later, run down and killed by a hit-and-run driver, later revealed to be a Yandere pursuing MJ and trying to "protect" her.

The second time was more dangerous. This time a mentally unbalanced woman who mistook her for her character (and who was apparently in love with "Troy" the male character who had been jilted by MJ's character) actually tried to shoot MJ. She missed and was subdued by a police officer, but MJ was frightened for a while, wondering if this was what Peter had to go through every day.

The Powerpuff Girls go into squee mode when they hear their favorite TV heroine Tess Turbine will be appearing at Townsville Mall ("To Be Or Not TV," DC issue #38). When a monster invades and takes this Tess captive, the girls are devastated when she turns out to be an actress playing Tess for this live appearance and cannot defend herself or fight the monster. When the girls renounce their fandom of Tess, the Professor gives them a little lesson in what really matters.

Subverted in American Flagg!, where Reuben Flagg, famous for playing a Plexus Ranger on TV, actually becomes a real one (though not by choice).

The first Toy Story sees Woody's exasperation with Buzz Lightyear who fails to realize he is, in fact, a toy, and not a Space Ranger. In the sequel, he gets to convince another Buzz Lightyear figure of the same thing.

A Bug's Life: The circus troupe's acting is mistaken for real heroics.

In Yellow Submarine, Old Fred warns Ringo to not press a specific button. Ringo accidentally presses it anyway and gets ejected out of the sub and into the middle of the Sea of Monsters. Children would later approach Ringo himself and ask "Why did you press the button?"

And it isn't just the fans from outer space who conflate the two; their die-hard human fans on Earth sometimes have the same problem:

Brandon: But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no beryllium sphere, no digital conveyor, no ship... Nesmith: It's all real. Brandon: Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I KNEW IT!

The basis of the plot of ¡Three Amigos! when some poor and desperate Mexican villagers mistake three (down on their luck) movie stars for the heroes they play on-screen and hire them to protect their town from real bandits. For their part, the actors are also quite desperate and reverse the trope, mistaking the real bandits for actors.

After seeing him cheated out of winning a fixed match in Ready to Rumble, two unbelievably stupid wrestling fans track down (fictional) WCW wrestler "Jimmy King" and are shocked to find that he's a pathetic drunk and not a hero. Fortunately, over the course of the movie they manage to turn him into a hero.

Played with in Airplane! with co-pilot Roger Murdock. A kid insists he's Kareem Abdul-Jabbar over his denials - until the kid tells how his dad thinks Kareem isn't trying on the court, then it gets personal.

Idiocracy features a TV show called Ow, My Balls! with a character constantly getting situations where he gets hit in the balls by something. When Joe meets the show's actor later, he finds that people commonly run up to the actor and kick him in the balls because they saw it on TV.

Literature

In Philip Roth's novel Zuckerman Unbound, writer Nathan Zuckerman encounters fans who call him "Carnovsky," mistaking him for the title character of his book.

In Moving Pictures, when the Holy Wood monsters start manifesting in the real world, everyone expects clicks star Victor Maraschino to do something about it. He protests that he's never actually done any heroing, but nobody listens; they've all seen him.

In One Hundred Years of Solitude, the opening of Macondo's first cinema causes a few problems because of this: when the actor that played a dying character in one movie appears as an Arab in the next one, the locals riot.

In Robert McCloskey's Homer Price the actor who plays the "Super-Duper" in movie serials makes an appearance at the Centerburg theater and Freddy asks if he could do some horseshoe bending or flying for them. Disillusionment sets in later when the actor's car ends up in a ditch and needs to be towed to Homer's father's filling station.

Live-Action TV

In one episode of Friends, Joey does a print PSA for STD awareness, and then has trouble getting dates afterwards, while his own family bans him from coming home for Thanksgiving dinner for fear of getting sick.

In another episode, Brooke Shields portrayed a Loony Fan stalking Joey, convinced that he was really the character he played in a Soap Opera. The friends got rid of her by convincing her that Joey was actually the Evil Twin instead.

In the pilot of The Beverly Hillbillies, Jed asks if Tom Mix is in Beverly Hills, only to be told that Mix is dead (the actor died in 1940). Jed then says "Oh, yeah! What's the matter with me? Remember Peril? He got shot at the end of that picture."

In Drake & Josh, Josh was hired to play a criminal as part of a Crime Reconstruction. He was thereafter arrested several times by people confusing him for the actual criminal.

In a 30 Rock episode, the mother of Jack's Puerto Rican girlfriend hates him because he looks exactly like the villain of a Mexican telenovela she watches. (Both are played by Alec Baldwin, of course.)

Extras plays with this, in that an Adam Westing Shaun Williamson is so typecast as Barry (a character he played for ten years on British soap Eastenders) that even the credits identify him as "Barry".

In the 1970's sitcom Alice, when George Burns happens to drop by the diner, ditzy waitress Vera thinks he's God (from his film Oh, God!) paying a visit. She identifies him as George Burns at the end of the show; when asked why, she replies God would never flirt with Flo.

In the Psych episode "Lights! Camera! Homicidio!", the killer was a rabid telenovela fan who had confused the show with real life. She was killing actors whose characters had been cruel to the lead actress' character.

That might be an homage to an episode of Hawaii Five-O where a mentally ill boy kills men who resemble characters menacing the female protagonist of his favorite comic strip.

In the NCIS episode "Cover Story", a Loony Fan of McGee's books thinks that they're true stories, and goes on a rampage killing the people that McGee based his villains on. He eventually tries to kill Abby because "Amy" broke up with "McGregor," but is stopped (and then arrested) when McGee tells him that "Amy" and "McGregor" are getting married.

In an episode of The Famous Jett Jackson, Jett meets a kid who thinks he really is Silverstone, the cool spy he plays on TV.

Of course, the wrap-up movie reveals that Silverstone is real in a parallel universe, when Jett and Silverstone accidentally swap places.

In the Quantum Leap episode "Moments to Live," Sam leaps into the star of a medical soap opera, and is kidnapped by a fan who wants the fictional doctor to be the father of her child.

In one episode of The Brady Bunch, Peter tries out for the school play and gets the role of Benedict Arnold. Whenever he tells anyone whom he's playing, they inevitably respond with, "Traitor!"

This is the set-up for Legend. Ernest Pratt, a dime-store novelist in the old west, lives with his scientist friend Professor Janos Bartok in the small town of Sheridan, Colorado. The people of Sheridan mistakenly believe that Pratt—a drinker, gambler, and womanizer—is the audacious and pure hero of his novels, Nicodemus Legend. Bartok and his associate, Ramos, convince Pratt to assume the Legend persona while supplying him with Legend-like futuristic gadgets that they invent.

In an episode of Forever Knight, the only witness to a murder is a retarded person who saw a masked wrestler do the deed. But all other evidence suggests that the man who plays the masked wrestler was innocent. Eventually the detectives realize that the witness considered anyone wearing the mask to be the wrestler in question, and thus didn't realize that someone else was wearing the costume.

The Sopranos: Tony Soprano idolizes Gary Cooper, who in his mind epitomizes "the strong silent type", the ideal kind of American from a long-gone era. He's called on this by his number two, who points out he's mixing the real life person with the characters that he played. Tony still argues that the icon is what matters.

In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk and the Actor", Adrian Monk gets shadowed by stage actor David Ruskin (played by Stanley Tucci). Ruskin immerses himself so much in the role that he has a nervous breakdown after he takes a car dealership owner hostage, thinking the guy is Trudy's killer.

Inverted in "Supernatural" episode The French Mistake where Sam and Dean are thrown into an alternate reality where their life is a tv show. People treat Sam and Dean like their alternate reality actors, Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki, and are confused when they insist they really are the fictional characters, Sam and Dean.

How I Met Your Mother has William Zabka Adam Westing himself in a recurring role, as all the jerk and villain roles he's played (primarily the main bully in The Karate Kid) has resulted in every single person he's met confusing him for his roles and will automatically boo him on sight, even his own mother. He's touched that Barney sees him as a hero, though admittedly that's because Barney has a case of Rooting for the Empire and always feels the villain roles were the real protagonists and the heroes are actually villains.

Adam West himself handwaved this on The Big Bang Theory when his status as the best Batman over Val Kilmer (who apparently made saying "I'm Batman" into an art form) is questioned.

Adam West: I don't have to say "I'm Batman." I just walk into a room and everyone already knows I'm Batman.

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Professional Wrestling

In 2015, Stardust started mocking and harassing Stephen Amell, the star of Arrow, convinced he really is his character, and insisting on addressing him as "Oliver Queen" or "Green Arrow". Stardust then started styling himself as a supervillain who would destroy Green Arrow. This led to a tag team match of Stardust and Wade Barrett vs Amell and Adrian Neville, which Amell's team won.

Video Games

In Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, both the President Of The Galaxy and Big Bad Dr. Nefarious apparently believe Clank's Secret Agent Clank holovid role to be real and that Ratchet is merely his valet.

Somewhat justified in that they are both aware Clank was involved with actually saving the galaxy twice before, along with Ratchet, and assumed the guy they've seen being badass is the actual badass of the two.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor with the actor Antharia Jack, who plays an adventurer on TV and plays a lot of adventure computer games. He does manage to act a bit like an adventurer during the rescue scene in the Grand Inquisitor's prison complex.

Early in Mortal Kombat 9's story mode, this is Johnny Cage's reaction when Liu Kang and Raiden try to recruit him for the fight against Shao Kahn. While Johnny does have actual superpowers, he thinks Liu and Raiden are just roleplayers who are too in-character and that the tournament is just that, a tournament. he tells them, "I'm an ACTOR. I save people in the movies. If this 'Shao Kahn' is such a threat, get the military."

Marik: Also joining us is celebrity voice actor Dan Green! Dan Green: Hi. I'm Dan Green. Bakura: What the bloody hell is he doing here? He's not a villain! Dan Green: No, but I played a villain in one of the Pokemon movies.

Inverted in an episode where Patty and Selma kidnap Richard Dean Anderson due to their obsession with MacGyver. After he macgyvers an escape from the room they've locked him in, he gets such a kick that he stays with them in spite of the kidnapping, eventually calling himself MacGyver and trying to imitate his fictional persona. He ends up becoming so annoying that they drive him off with boring vacation slides.

In "Homer to the Max", a new police drama airs, starring a maverick cop named Homer Simpson.

Homer: Wow. They captured my personality perfectly! Did you see the way Daddy caught that bullet? Lisa: That's not really you, Dad, he's just a fictional character who happens to have the same name. Homer: Don't confuse Daddy, Lisa.

When the character is later retooled as a bumbling Plucky Comic Relief moron, the guys at Moe's torment the "real" Homer by demanding he do something stupid like his namesake character.

In one of the Treehouse of Horror episodes, Lucy Lawless is constantly being referred to as Xena, leaving her to exclaim more exhortedly each time "I'm not Xena, I'm Lucy Lawless". Eventually she is captured by Comic Book Guy as part of a collection of live action actors frozen in carbonite plastic. Bart and Lisa try to save her but fail and she has to fight him off with She-Fu moves, high kicks, back flips and ululating. She then grabs the children and flies off with them.

Throughout the story, Lawless speaks in the Fake American accent she used for Xena rather than her native New Zealand accent.

Something similar happened when she made a guest appearance on another show: the episode starts with one of the male leads thinking Xena was going to kill him.

Homer himself is a particularly extreme example:

FBI Agent: Most people write letters to movie stars. This Simpson guy writes to movies. "Dear Die Hard. You rock. Especially when that guy was on the roof. P.S: Do you know Mad Max?"

In "Mr Plow", Barney goes one step further and confuses the actor with the wrong role as he bids a cheerful farewell to "Superman" and promises to protect his secret identity...to an Adam WestingAdam West. Actually, that's why the trope once was named Your Secret's Safe With Me, Superman.

In an episode of Family Guy, Peter writes to Richard Dean Anderson, thinking he is MacGyver, asking him to save his dog from the pound with a rubber band, paper clip, and straw. He puts his eye out.

Fanboy on Freakazoid!. The minute he sees Mark Hamill, his delusion that he's Luke Skywalker gets turned up to 11.

The Looney Tunes Show: In "Off Duty Cop", Daffy is unable to understand that his favourite character Steve St. James is actually an actor named Leslie Hunt, so he decides to become Steve St. James himself.

Harrison Ford: Listen. I'm 62 years old, and I'm just an actor. You people are all insane. Star Wars fan: Go get'em, Han Solo!

Of course when Mark Hamill reminds everyone that he blew up the Death Star with his eyes closed, he's told "That was just a movie, dude", by the exact same Star Wars fanboy.

A similar Star Wars example in a different episode has Billy Dee Williams (similar to the Real Life example below) explaining Lando's actions at a grocery store.

The season 4 premiere opened with a sketch wherein Seth Green and Matt Senreich try to get jobs in Hollywood after the "cancellation" of Robot Chicken, first meeting up with Joss Whedon. That meeting very quickly devolves into an attempt on the duo's life because Whedon starts believing that Seth is a werewolf, just like his character in one of Whedon's shows was.

Invoked in Celebrity Deathmatch; During the fight between the cast of Sex and the City, Johnny Gomez tells Nick Diamond that it's highly unprofessional to confuse an actor with the character they play.

One Totally Spies! villain was a crazed fan of a soap opera who kidnapped one of the actors, thinking he was his character, and tried to make him her boyfriend.

In the Bob's Burgers episode "The Hormone-iums" after Tina gets the lead role in a hyperbolic school play about the dangers of mono, all the students start treating her as if she's her character.

In Batman: The Animated Series, a certain Simon Trent played a Batman-like superhero named Gray Ghost in an immensely popular TV show which little Bruce was a big fan of. In the episode "Beware of the Gray Ghost", set decades later, Trent is facing poverty partly because he cannot get any roles because everyone still thinks of him as the Gray Ghost. Then Batman comes along on a case and ropes him in to assist him. Much to his own surprise, Trent make a passable superhero (and more importantly, learns that the Big Badass Batman is primarily inspired by his portrayal of one).

A fairly meta example, when you consider the actor voicing Trent is none other than Adam West. It also crosses into Heartwarming Moments because, according to the DVD Commentary, if they hadn't gotten West to voice the character, they'd have scrapped the episode.

Series one of Monkey Dust had a sketch where the comedian David Baddiel would frequently be called on to perform difficult specialist tasks (such as brain surgery or piloting a space shuttle) because as a famous comedian he should be able to adapt to any role, even off-stage.

In the BoJack Horseman Christmas Special, BoJack has to explain to Todd that Goober didn't assault those Laker Girls, the actor playing Goober did.

Real Life

Tom Felton used to be mistaken for the real Malfoy by little kids. Not surprising, considering their age.

Every actor will at one point encounter fans who don't seem to understand the difference between the role they play and who they really are. Some common examples:

If an actor is seen with his real life partner instead of the actress who plays his wife in a TV series some people will think he's committing adultery.

...But I Play One on TV: An actor who performs a certain profession will be thought to be an expert in the matter himself.

Actors who have accidents, divorces or other kinds of tragic occurrences in films and TV series will sometimes be addressed by complete strangers in the street who want to give them advice or help them out. A similar confusion appears when said actor plays a pitiful character.

One of the most common examples of this trope occurs with actors who play villains or antagonists. Some people refuse to have anything to do with them or will even criticize them, insult them or get violent when they meet them in the street. Especially if their character is an exception to Evil Is Cool; a person playing a Magnificent Bastard or even a horror icon won't get this as badly as a Smug Snake or Hate Sink does.

The phenomenon can even be witnessed in politics. Many actors have been elected to official governmental posts because voters liked them for the heroic roles they usually perform on screen: Ronald Reagan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood,... Despite the fact that following a film script is a lot easier than handling Real Life situations.

Reagan is a particularly interesting example, because his detractors often claimed that his mental state lead him to think that he was a Hollywood hero fighting against the "Evil Empire" in the Soviet Union. His entire "Star Wars" defense system was inspired by the eponymous film, despite not being a very realistic depiction of space in the first place. Other people have claimed that Reagan's supposed "charming confused grandpa" image was an act in itself that fooled both his supporters and critics into thinking that he was a mere puppet in the hands of his own government. (This became Harsher in Hindsight after President Reagan left office, when it was finally revealed that long-standing allegations, dating back to his Presidential campaign in 1984, that he suffered from Alzheimer's Disease were in fact true.)

It extends to those who became internet memes. Blake Boston, better known as "Scumbag Steve," discovered his memedom and openly embraced it, even reaching out to the girl behind "Annoying Facebook Girl" when she discovered she was also a meme, and gave her the following advice.

"But heres what I need you to know. When you go off to college, and youre walking down the hall and a group of kids see you and scream, Oh my god its Annoying Facebook Girl, dont cry. You see. Some people cant distinguish the internet from real life. There are people who refuse to believe my name isnt Steve and that I am not really the scumbag (well not all the time, that is). Just remember who you are. And that you know youre a decent kid."

Rudolph Valentino, was a 1920s Hollywood actor famous for playing a handsome sheik who abducted women to his tent. When Valentino unexpectedly died at the height of his fame, mass hysteria broke out under his fans. Some women even committed suicide, seemingly not understanding that Valentino was an actor, not a real life amourous sheik.

Rita Hayworth, famous for playing the femme fatale in Gilda, once said: "Everyone wants to go to bed with Gilda. Then they wake up with me."

The Academy of Motion Pictures & Sciences also seems to suffer from this problem. Many actors have received Oscars over the years because they played a pitiful person who suffers from some kind of disease, handicap or problem in a high profile movie released that same year. Or because they played an admirable humanitarian activist or historical character. The award in those cases seems to be more a reward for the hardships or good deeds the character underwent or did in the movie than the performance itself.

The Nostalgia Chick often acted as if her character was mean to her best friend Nella. Quite some viewers of her web video series took this abuse seriously and criticized Lindsay for not treating Nella better. It got to the point that Nella herself had to type a statement that they are just performing an act.

Somewhat similarly, an early Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers episode ran an And Knowing Is Half the Battle segment in which the actors who played the bullies Bulk and Skull explained that they were just actors and didn't actually bully or hit other people in real life when they got annoyed with them.

In 2006, when Michael Richards got in trouble for a racist tirade towards some black hecklers, many news outlets referred to Richards as Kramer, with some headlines like "KKKramer". It reached the point that the Kramer character's namesake, Kenny Kramer, had to issue a public statement saying he himself wasn't racist.

Louise Marwood, who plays Chrissy on Emmerdale, gets mistaken for her character.

Anna Gunn, who plays Skyler White on Breaking Bad, got this in spades. The intense hatred for Skyler ended up spreading to Gunn, with many people (particularly on Twitter) openly stating they would attack Gunn if they met her in real life. Gunn wrote in aNew York Times opinion piece that she even received death threats from idiotic fans who couldn't separate her from her character.

Masi Oka seems to deliberately encourage this. In interviews, he's explicitly compared himself to both Hiro and Max, saying there's a lot of himself in each of them. There have also been plenty of jokes about whether or not he's actually got time-bending powers himself or just a very intimate knowledge of space-time in a promotional video for Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds.

Members of the Yogscast are frequently confused for the 'persona' that they put on when making videos, especially in their Minecraft series, where Rythian, Duncan Jones and Sjin were all mistakenly viewed as hating one another despite being friends in real life. This can partly be put down to the blurring of the line between 'character' and 'actor' in Let's Plays.

Margaret Hamilton was a beloved kindergarten teacher before her iconic role as the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz - and for years she had children coming up to her asking why she was so mean to Dorothy. She even had to guest star on an episode of Mr Rogers Neighborhood to explain that the witch was just a character she played.

James Michael Tyler claims that after the episode of Friends aired where Ross and Rachel break up - an angry woman came up to him to yell at him for telling Rachel that Ross cheated.

In 1980 when the movie Fame came out and sprinkled its stardust in the eyes of young wannabes, parents would enroll their kids at the New York School for the Performing Arts and ask "Is this the school Coco (a fictional character in the film) attends?"

There's an urban legend that Christopher Reeve or George Reeves was once threatened by a child with a gun, who wanted to test "Superman's" invulnerability. Reeve/Reeves supposedly talked the child out of it by claiming the bullet would ricochet off him and could hurt the child or other bystanders.

Sylvester Stallone canceled a publicity tour for Rambo III in Europe out of fear of terrorism. When this was met with jeers about "big, tough" Rambo being afraid, he pointed out his critics were doing exactly what he thought the terrorists might do: confusing the role "Rambo" with the real-life actor Stallone.

At the time of the Jack the Ripper murders in Whitechapel, famous actor Richard Mansfield was starring in a theatrical adaptation of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. According to Wikipedia, "One frightened theatre-goer wrote to the police accusing Mansfield of the murders because he could not believe that any actor could make so convincing a stage transformation from a gentleman into a mad killer without being homicidal."

According to one book about the making of the show, an adult woman once stopped Sonia Manzano (Maria) and Emilio Delgado (Luis) in the street, and it became clear she thought they were really married. When they explained they weren't, she looked surprised, then said "Well, as long as you're happy."

A 2015 article on "Tough Pigs" written by someone who only realised Sesame Street wasn't mostly real apart from the Muppets when she saw a copy of Roscoe Orman's autobiography. She points out a lot of it was real. The documentary clips about how things are made were real. The quasi-improv scenes of Muppets interacting with kids were real. Why not the street scenes?

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